A Big MonstEr Blog: Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

A New Story by Butch Ekstrom

The grouping of sounds . . . said something comforting to Inman about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.
-- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Hello, hello, baby -- You called? I can't hear a thing. I have got no service in the club, you see see. What, what did you say? Oh, you're breaking up on me! Sorry, I cannot hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy. Kinda busy. Kinda busy. Sorry, I cannot hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy.

-- Lady Gaga, "Telephone”

  Because I try to balance my vulnerable senses and maintain my equilibrium during difficult times, I have been re-reading a book called Cold Mountain. It's about the chaos of battle, panic and loss, perseverance, and ultimately the hope for redemption in the old South during those bleak, defeating days after the Confederacy fell to the Union. Inman is the protagonist of the book. Yes, that's right -- Inman.

Struggling back up the slopes of Cold Mountain seemed the right thing to do since lately I have experienced (in my troubled mind), unwillingly and incessantly, patterns of four -- thoughts, phantoms, memories, fears, questions, or some combination thereof -- that collide and become jumbled up in that hidden but conscious part of myself that I call Me. Each package of four always I experience as a mysterious and discordant nexus. I know what I imagine is not real. But yesterday I believe I saw four jagged and stony pieces of meteorites, aimed at me like brutal, fleeing convicts scarily blowing in from the four corners of our minimum security galaxy, borne on perpendicular shafts of gray interstellar winds. Like the raw ingredients of an unholy zia, the four racing rocks seemed to have emanated from a secretive otherworldly desert. As yesterday gave way to nightfall, my thoughts became fixed on a collection of daring, logo-covered stock cars -- each was coming relentlessly toward me from north, south, east, west -- grill toward grill, bright and flashy headlights merging into a blazing white and blinding spotlight, as if a chicken at the crossroads battle had been green-flagged by an unseen and evil-minded mastermind. Goofy. Troubling. Unstoppable. As each of these episodes recedes in my imagination, with the postmodern and symbolic ambiguity of a David Lynch movie, I hear this song, Into the Great Wide Open, as unseen credits roll,

     They moved into a place they both could afford,
     He found a night club he could work at the door,
     She had a guitar and she taught him some chords,
     The sky was the limit -- Into the great wide open,
     Under them skies of blue. Out in the great wide open.
     Rebels without a clue.

So what will this day bring? I have a premonition that it might be my last. But that's probably just my paranoia at work. Why do I say so? Because here in the darkness before dawn . . .
I am staring transfixed, sensing a hotness in me, at a strangely alluring piece of photo-art. It is a stylish picture made with a classy Nikon camera on a sizzling desert day near the Four Corners of the Southwest. It decorates the front panel of a CD jewel-case by a local rock 'n roll band. The group is called Dark-Eyed Juncos -- desert-dusty, sharp billed, and relentless scavenger birds of prey. They (the musicians) remind me of hardened, blue collar power trios like Cream, Rush, the James Gang, and other music legends.

This stylish picture's hues are primarily black, white, gray, and a color that makes me whisper (to myself) fuchsia, a lush pinkish hue. It depicts my friend -- and current stylist at a place called Dream in Color -- named June (who plays a dedicated-to-rock bass guitar for the Juncos in local clubs) and her two middle-aged male bandmates. She is perched in the middle. These men have crept close to her and appear to be whispering secrets into her left ear and the right. ('Here we go again. I feel the chemicals kickin' in. It's getting heavy and I wanna run. I wanna run and hide. -- So, what are you waitin' for? Take a bite of my heart tonight!) One man is dressed in a spotless and glimmering white linen suit, topped by a tilted white fedora. The other is clothed in a diabolical black frock coat, with a pirate-style do-rag (all black with white diamonds) tied over his skull and an equally black gentleman's stylish top hat over it all.

June wears a stylish, but reasonably modest, gray dress, an enveloping shawl with long strands of fringe, and high cut gray-leather boots sharply decorated by straps and buckles. She sits outdoors whimsically (reminiscent of the mythical Alice, in a granny rocker, anxiously making her way back from Wonderland) on a fiery hot, improbably overstuffed easy chair of fuchsia out in the burning Mesa Arts Center park. June has a 'curious girl' -- or is it perplexed and frustrated? -- maybe surprised but heart-aching -- expression on her face. Her finely etched eyebrows are arched high. For the moment, she seems pinned tight to her perch, like an avian corpse stuck on the board of a science experiment. The entire photo backdrop is a mysterious blend of pink and gray, like an airborne cloud tinted by a flaring sunset. In the middle, at the top of the photo, is a prominent number 928 (which seems harmless enough) on a plain black panel. Ambiguity and ambivalence drip like liquid drugs from this CD cover. What secretive temptations, what salacious thoughts, which indecent proposals, what hurtful assertions are being whispered into June's ears? What does she hear? (Does she hear anything?) Will that linen white or distrusting black one turn her head? I begin to imagine that June is, what now?, what?, shaking, rattling like an angry desert snake's tail, now coming apart while lurching back and forth hard -- a desert bird, a junco, ensnared, pinned, pulled, then ripped by the wings while anxiously attempting to take flight. -- I blink and everything goes white. In my thoughts, I fear that I have gotten lost somehow, not knowing where, on a vast and sunny expanse of Death Valley desert.

But somehow and for some clouded reason I suddenly stand erect and gaze blankly, feeling alone -- there is no searing heat, no numbing cold, no physical sensations at all -- outside the glass door of the cramped little hair salon of Cheri Casio (a stylist of mine from another lifetime -- but not that long ago . . . ), which I visited almost monthly for twenty years. I am looking through the wide pane of glass that holds the swinging door-frame and spreads out to effectively form most of Cheryl's storefront wall. It is a sultry and cloudy afternoon during the month of June. It is the year 2006. Forgettable days. Summer in the South is really coming on. A sense of irony wells up in me. The building that holds Cheri's cramped quarters is growing steadily warmer because the Louisiana humidity (a phenomenon constant and oppressive in the old South during deep Summer months) is beginning to build up like a radioactive cloud. Many of the little hair and fingernail shops surrounding Cheri's are dark and abandoned, haunted by the irrevocable loss of their lease-holders who fled the tornadic violence of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then the horrific flooding aftermaths those troublemaking ladies brought to town.
I notice that my in-glass reflection looks forlorn, I am shaggy and unkempt, dark half-moon circles of depression underline my eyes, my shirt is wrinkled. I read the name of Cheri's business painted in green and gold just above eye-level -- A Cutting Remark -- on the illuminated pane. I hesitate. I can't bring myself to push inside just like old times. I am leaving. Soon. It's going to come too soon! Is this the last time? "Probably," I whisper wistfully, to myself and gaze down. No one overhears me.

Cheri has been a kind and loyal (but fundamentally lonely and husband-hungry) friend, month after month, year after year (for almost 20 years, over 200 styling trips in, I told you). -- She's a Catholic girl raised on a Mississippi riverbank across from New Orleans. She exhibits great pride, precision and perfectionism in her work. Once a thriving business, she has now lost much of her clientele to the powerful storms that have come and gone. Cheri would invariably ask for my Dear Abby opinions, as we waited for her hair-dyes to seep into my roots and before she would go swinging her scissors around my head, about her recurring troubles with men both single and married.

That forlorn aspect I see in my reflection is beginning to feel like an anvil of guilt pulling down on my neck. Okay, I will not tell her that this is the last time before I leave. No farewell. No 'thanks a lot,' my dear. I have decided. Sorrow will rule the day. (Sadly I know this is the wrong thing to do.) I hold a tattered, paperback copy of the novel Cold Mountain, which I thought I was going to re-read as we waited in uncomfortable chairs for the hair color to take effect. -- Why? . . . Seven long months have passed in this damaged and reeling area, as it struggles back toward wholeness from being hurled into a barely civilized, medieval state by ferocious winds and deluges, still reeking with the acrid and messy smells of hurricane floods rising up from the bayou turfs. Each stressful day (all through 2006) devolved slowly into a long wake in an unsanitary civic funeral parlor, yes, a wake that refused to end at sunset, like a nightmare and unfunny parody the film Groundhog Day. I tell myself: Not one more painful utterance of 'So-long, pal. Thank you and goodbye. You've been great.' No more daylong wakes. Not one more clingy handshakes. No more awkward hugs and teary endings. So I turn my back wordlessly, regretfully, to A Cutting Remark. I feel sad beyond words. Walking toward my car, head down, like a preoccupied pall-bearer carrying a corpse toward a gaping hole that's already been dug. I know this is wrong, an immoral choice, a sorry turn of the screw. Perspiration drops trace from my neck down my guilty spine. I wonder if Cheri will forgive me for my disappearing act. I will try whisper an emotional 'I'm sorry,' ever the conman at work, into her ear someday.

Stop thinking this, I command. Then my imagination heats up, working hard, and I let slip to the ground the worn paperback of Cold Mountain -- as if I am stroke victim gone horrifically numb on the left side -- but I am not standing in the raggedy parking lot anymore. No, I standing upright again in a place far (perhaps very far?) away, inexplicably, that I have never encountered before . . .

but . . . a strong feeling of disbelief overwhelms me. I feel dizzy and claustrophobic. I have been been lurking motionless -- on a hard, gray industrial carpet -- in the dim and poorly finished-basement hallway of an indistinct office building. The walls need to be washed, having turned iron-gray mixed with urine yellow, an unattractive and cloudy tableau. I sense anger and disbelief. This basement smells like an ancient library. Well, in fact, it is an old library I notice. A high-tech office telephone with a complicated panel of buttons and lights sits archly on a thin white shelf by my side, a waist-high protrusion on the bottom half of an old dutch door. The message-waiting light on the phone flashes red brightly. -- On (red). Off. On (red). Off. On (red). Flash. Flash. Red. Flash. Off. Red (on) . . . Persistent. Unflagging. You've got mail are the disembodied words that echo through the hallway. Tirelessly the blinking continues. Eight voice messages have been captured in the terminus. Eight lights a flashin' . . . Seven calls a waitin' . . . Six words unheeded, I hum spontaneously, stupidly, to myself. The phone flashing red, off, red, off, red, off has been ignored for six months, perhaps more. This I somehow know. I judge it to be an evil sign.

Anger swells anew in my heart. This phone extension apparently belongs to any staff member. A catchy song -- Hello, hello baby. You called? I can't hear a thing! -- about telephoning pops into my head. Then, a nameless, faceless aged co-worker stands with me, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this situation is all wrong. Callous inattention and disrespect are words that preoccupy me.

I ask her, why did these calls come in? What did the callers want? Does anyone care?
In a hushed tone, the old woman worker tells me, ' . . . Well, you see, sir, the secret password was not retained. No one has it. Can't do anything about it. Not now.'

Then, she shrugs. I feel like bursting because I am so mad. Liquid and toxic disdain floods my body and soul.

And who's gonna fix this? Who's gonna this mess clean up?, I demand to know, like a charging bull in small pen. Get I.T. pronto. No excuses. Fix it. -- Who's in charge here?

I appear to myself like the hollow shell of a court-martialed officer, clothed disgracefully in a tattered uniform, a failed leader with no conscripts, bereft of his battalion of Misfit Toys, sent back to an empty barrack. Big winds issue from empty caves, I remember, as an old saying goes.
The bland co-worker replies like a dispassionate junior officer, 'Why, you are, sir. You're in charge."

I blanch, my hands fly up, and I lean back quickly as if shocked by an electrical current. Here it comes again, I tell myself. There is a tingle creeping up my neck, then I get a rush of vertigo and quickly I feel turned upside down by an unknown force.

Then rapidly, incongruously, I go slip-sliding down a steep metal chute that has just opened, straight into the driver's seat of my frigid automobile, slamming down hard on my butt but seated upright, at the chute's bottom. I hear a bone-crunching sound. My tailbone area crackles in pain. After a single nervous breath, immersed in the green glow of my illuminated dashboard, a strange fantasy swirls to life –

I am driving my car to the New Orleans airport, block after urban block in the famed Garden District. It is a wickedly frigid and deeply dark winter morning. The neighborhood is enveloped by a pure blackness, an unexplored and underground cave. Silence reigns. Houses are dark inside and out. Many are abandoned, boarded up, water-scarred; some are tagged with painted-on graffiti, courtesy of post-Katrina search and rescue squads. Many tags are shaped like a cross (with a variety cryptic symbols around it -- these denote clues like 'empty house,' use caution, or 'abandoned animal on these grounds)' There are still bodies of people and animals lying, decomposing, in some of these places. But search teams have gone home and must be sleeping now in warm encampments of their own. A great many street signs are utterly useless. They lay face down, their poles flat on the easements by the sidewalks or wedged in messy gutters, toppled by the ravaging winds and floods those big, hurricane girls brought by.

My headlights shine like the eyes of a wild beast in this deep, unnatural darkness. On the deadly day of August 29, 2005, thousands of streetlights all over the city of New Orleans malfunctioned catastrophically. Their cycle of lights -- red-green-yellow-red -- disappeared. Traffic lights began to blink either yellow or red incessantly as the Hurricane Katrina headwinds at last relented. The maddening and incessant flashing for months upon months, most of the lights in the Garden District were yellow, lacked clarity and finality, hurled caution into the wind. It symbolized a taunting message from the inscrutable gods: 'Heads-up, trouble abounds. There be no safe passage during this life.' The taunting, like trash talk on the basketball court, went on month after month unremitting throughout the city streets. 'Fragile is life, vulnerable is humanity, we hold your fate in our hands, so vulnerable are you! At times the taunt went: 'Make your own rules. No more black and white, no more red and green. Nothing clear. Or make a break for it. Dare you, you loser.'

At a very slow speed under the morning darkness, worried about who or what might be approaching, I roll the car carefully to the storied intersection of Broadway and Freret, near historic but hurricane-ravaged Tulane University. On Broadway I am heading toward the airport. A shiny dark red Suburban emerges oversized, from darkness, to my right. It comes toward Broadway on Freret Street. It is on a right angle to me. Its brakes whine as it halts for the yellow light. I look over. The whole scene goes bright yellow, then dark, then . . . on each of the four street corners sheets of cold mists -- like an amber cloud of airborne illness -- settle down and seem to spread like paint over all.
I think I see Cheri sitting the Suburban's driver-seat, a thick black coat with a high collar is pulled up around her neck and dark hair. Her stare is red-eyed, menacing ungodly. I am very alarmed. The woman looks right through me. Her lips are closed tight but I sense her angry sentiment "Get away!" She shakes her head back and forth, violently, to emphasize her bitter indictment. I spy an animal in the Suburban with her. Dark-tempered, black, and furry -- a big dog?, a gorilla?, a black wolf?, a unidentifiable predator from an untamed wilderness? The beast stalks around the interior of her SUV with menace, its full furry tail swishing madly. Momentarily I think of piney, Tennessee forests swaying in stiff winds in the story of Cold Mountain. A horrific sense of resignation wells up in me. I sigh -- but the whiny sound of my cold breath redounds to me, from the green glow dashboard, doleful and stale. The cold pinpricks my face like a spray of ice pellets. Heartbreak takes me. I feel lost. Alone in the dark. Freezing and lost.

A song springs up on my car radio -- "Animal" (In a millisecond, I fall into a confused and questioning state. This cannot be, not in truth! The properties of time, sound, and place bend precariously right before me. This recording will not be heard by anyone, anywhere, on any radio, until 2010. -- Yet, here it plays in the deeply dark winter cloud, an up-tempo departure anthem, much too uptempo for this deep, misty cold, and soulful pre-dawn –

     Here we go again, I feel the chemicals kickin' in
     It's getting heavy, and I wanna run
     And hide -- I wanna run and hide,
     I do it every time, you're killin' me now
     And I won't be denied by you
     The animal inside of you. Oh oh,
     I want some more. Oh oh
     What are you waiting for?
     Say goodbye to my heart tonight.

I grunt a utter an Ugh. --I whisper more lyrics just heard: 'Hush, hush. It's us that's made this mess. So what are we gonna do?'

The unbidden song ends with an eerie fade, not a cold, definitive endstop. No music follows. Radio static buzzes around my ears as if the station has suddenly signed off. I reach for the FM buttons. I remind myself reprovingly that the radio in my vehicle no longer works.
The scratchy static dies away. Silence prevails. The distressing yellow lights keep blinking. Momentarily, (like a fool) I worry needlessly that a runaway Amtrak train, it's exhausted conductor catnapping at the controls, will come crashing through this intersection to mash me senseless, just as Cheri's fiery Suburban runs into me. A four-corner, four-direction disaster is what I imagine, I gasp and look away. I wish it would . . . No . . . I don't, I don't, I won't. Moments of inaction slip by. No other vehicles materialize. Silence reigns. This stupid shit is just never going to end, I shrug. Dejection pricks me. S.S.D.D., I tell myself -- same stuff, different day.

(Time’s passage brings other prickly and unsuspected changes. Months after, my mind has cleared somewhat. I become aware that I am in a crowded lecture hall. I see a professor with a confident bearing standing behind a podium. I sit on the left hand margin among hushed classmates. She begins in a measured way to pose questions, matters deep to ponder, about post-traumatic stress disorder, as if it were a clinical disease. In her smooth and experienced voice, she develops a thesis. PTSD is a condition wherein someone victimized by a real life experience, which proves lastingly painful and horrific, is burdened, perhaps in an unalterable manner, by . . .

What? I say to myself. Confusion nips at my mind. I guess I fell asleep. Or my pitiful attention must have been wandering again, I surmise deceptively . . .

Yet I have undeniably heard certain words by the teacher behind the polished wood podium. What was it she said? The professor skims hastily over her prepared text toward a poignant endpoint, then glances at her wristwatch. Suddenly she seems pressed for time. I am still stuck on her previous point. She said – think about a Netflix movie that boots up time after time deep in someone's unlucky cortex in washed out colors. Purely there On-Demand, typically triggered by the pulsation of a hidden command button.

The lecturer asks them all to listen up. She is about to deliver her last, key point.

She peers down through a set of half-moon eyeglasses with shiny black rims, a very academic look. She holds her note pages steadily. She contends, 'Often an innocuous moment of sensation can be the tripwire, that hidden command that reignites the painful and life-changing experience one has had. Post-traumatic and disordered – p.t.s.d. to spell it out, a re-living of something one has suffered. It can come from the smoky odor of a house fire that turned a family's life into fear, despair, and cinders. It can be traced to an innocuous pinewood smell in a wardrobe or a piece of clothing steeped in dry cleaning fluid on a hanger deep inside a backroom closet. Or, as you all have no doubt heard, for many survivors locally of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it could be the storm-soaked reek -- just a whiff or two of some most putrid smell -- in a flooded home long abandoned or a motor car’s once flooded trunk now crammed with junk salvaged from a maelstrom. Finally, it could issue from sidewalk piles of ruined and discarded personal items: personal photos, kids' toys, broken knick knacks, decimated X-Box units, music collections, and stained castoff clothing, situated on easements in front of former family dwellings during the heat of a summertime.

The professor closes her notebook. She looks pale, grim, fretful. She looks up, lights glare across her half-moon glasses, and scans the lecture hall briefly. Silently she tucks her precise notes under an arm and strides out of the room without looking back. I notice one phrase -- author unknown -- scrawled onto a dry erase board behind the wood lecturn. It reads: 'Let us learn the lesson of the The Great Deluge and its rainbow. God will be with us. We've come too far to turn back now.'

I sit, in a dead-stop, at the nexus of Freret and Broadway, a crossroads, a zia some would think. It seems like time to fly. Gotta go, bro, I tell myself. Delta is ready when you are! 'We love to fly, and it shows!' -- The amber street lights caution against rash action; they flash without sentiment: Go. Don't! Go. Don't! Go? Don't! . . . . Sick stuff. Survival. Just doing their job. It's all too confusing. Prepare to stop, or prepare to fly?

Like in a poorly plotted horror movie, the false image of Cheri with the red eyes fades into the deep black mist. On all 4 corners, the absurd yellow blinking will go on for months more.

I think, ‘Can't anybody in this effing town repair anything? Can't anybody tell me clearly what I should do? How in the world. . .?’

Suddenly, I flinch. My cellphone vibrates somewhere deep inside an interior pocket in my hefty overcoat. Phone call? Text message?

      Hello, hello, baby. You called? I can't hear a thing.
     What, what did you say? Oh no, you're breaking up on me,
     So sorry I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy . . . –

A message at 4 in the morning? No. Impossible. It couldn’t be . . . My heart thuds. My stomach rolls. I feel that dizzying vertigo again, deeply spooked. I feel certain that I know who's trying to reach me. Yes, in fact, I'm sure of it. Here in the depths of darkness, with the promise of a possible dawn not far away, with my smartphone at my service, this cannot end well. In my mind I hear the twitchy trill of the future song again:

     Here it comes again
     I feel the chemicals kicking in
     And I wanna run and hide
     I wanna run and hide:
     Say goodbye to my heart to-night

And then -- without warning -- once more I find that I have been placed transfixed, a hotness rising like a cloudy mist in me, at a strangely-alluring piece of photo-art on a CD cover. The number 829 looms at the top of a black-slate panel, as do the ominous words A Dreamer's Remarks. I recall that this scene at some other time seemed harmless enough. But now, with alterations, it feels like the foretelling of a cruel coincidence, or a secret code? I ponder. Is this supposed to be funny, some kind of joke? I feel anger and resentment. But I smile in resignation because reality can be stone cold, unforgiving, unyielding. In my mind I hear the tinny echo of Tom Petty’s tune The Great Wide Open spark sickly to life. It’s coming from some cavernous space -- an empty house or deep cave shaft, I wonder -- that seems far away.

In an entrancing photo on the CD cover (the one which I am studying), there is an oddly appealing scene of three people, obviously a trio of rock 'n roll band mates. One man is in spotless linen white, with a spotless white fedora; one man is cloaked in a black frock coat with a black do-rag (covered with white diamonds) tied over the top of his head, and the last figure, a pretty female, named June, dead-centered in the picture, a Summer girl, wears big silver hoops for earrings, stylish gray clothing and high boots. She appears to be tight-lipped, perhaps curious, perhaps alarmed or perhaps grateful, as she heeds the words that one male companion whispers secretly in her ear. Yes, what is that secret, June? What do you hear?

I wait anxiously for clues: a whisper, a knowing glance, a receptacle into which meaning might be poured. But no one says anything. Perhaps things do just happen.